Advertising continues to be a major vehicle for exposing the advertiser's product to a potential customer. Several conventional “push” advertising mechanisms which have been in existence for communicating to potential customers comprise television, radio, billboards, and newspaper advertisements, all of which have played a major role in achieving the ultimate goal of making a sale to a customer by presenting the advertising to a general audience. However, with the stiff commercial competitiveness in existence in the marketplace today, vendors are seeking out new ways in which the potential customer can be reached to make the sale of a product.
The advent of a global communication packet-switched network, an example of which is the Internet, is providing an important new avenue for reaching the potential customer. Where the customer may not be reachable through broadcast advertising related to radio and television, he or she can now be reached through the Internet by directly communicating with the potential customer through their home computer system. Therefore, the potential customer base now becomes enormous. With the convergence of conventional broadcast system technologies and the global packet-switched communication technologies, like the Internet, new mechanisms using such technologies are desired to capture the attention of a potential customer for a short presentation of an advertisement.